I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field displays and display drivers and more particularly to a segmented redundant display cell interface apparatus and system and method.
II. Description of the Related Art
Present display cell driver systems include one or more video sources that are connected to the display cell driver interface, which is connected to the display cell itself. The video signals can be generated by any variety of sources including camera, radar systems, computer display generators and the like. The display cell itself is a display screen including LCDs, plasma screens, LED screens and other optical devices. The display cell driver interface is a circuit that accepts the video signals and generates the proper timing and voltage levels for all the drive signals needed by the display cell in order to display the image. Currently display cells are very fault tolerant in that if there is a display cell failure, only a few pixels, or a line of pixels typically fail. However, a failure on the driver interface circuitry can cause no information to be displayed at all causing a catastrophic single point failure. The current trend in many industries including avionics is toward a single display screen that can display several different smaller screens as sub-displays, displaying information from different video sources, within the one larger screen. Prior to this trend, there would be a single screen for each video source. However, as described above, a single catastrophic failure can cause none of the screens to display.